AV

A Robotruck IPO, Series Chipotle, and Wild Scout Encounter

We’ve written about autonomous vehicles (AVs) for people recently. Packages would like a word. We’ll start with updates from the fast lane and slow down from there. 

65 mph  

On Tuesday, TuSimple filed for an IPO. “Filing shows self-driving trucks still a money-loser,” a WSJ headline declared. Duh. What’s new is that we can see how much money they’re losing. 

TuSimple lost $178 million in 2020, over twice as much as the year before. Revenue climbed nearly 160% year over year to $1.8 million in 2020. Why the mounting losses? TuSimple is expanding testing and rolling out of what it calls an “autonomous freight network.” 

• Risk factor: TuSimple’s Chinese ties are being probed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews deals for national security risks.

25 mph 

On Wednesday, Nuro announced a Series C. The startup develops small, low-speed AVs sans human driving controls. US officials have given Nuro a permit to deploy up to 5,000 R2s (its second-gen vehicle) on public roads.

T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, and Baillie Gifford joined the round, along with other big names that are existing investors (SoftBank Vision Fund, Greylock). Woven Capital, Toyota’s new $800 million VC fund, also joined. We’ve really buried the lede here, because....Chipotle also joined the round. 

5 mph

Today, we’re sharing an inside look at the land of delivery bots. Shannon, a friend of the Brew, recently ordered something on Prime. Amazon’s Scout robot (unexpectedly) delivered the package to her in Midtown Atlanta. 

• Scouts have been “boppin' around my neighborhood a lot,” she tells us. The electric bot is also being beta tested in Tennessee, California, and Washington (state). 
• Ryan tweeted a thread with more details on how the Scout delivery process works. 

Big picture: You go bankrupt “gradually, then suddenly,” Ernest Hemingway used to say. 

AV development is as gradual as it gets, and the bankruptcy part is always lingering. But your chances of encountering AV test services in major US cities or on interstate highways are suddenly starting to rise. 

SUPPLY CHAIN

Out With the Old, Intel With the New

Tuesday was Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s first big public address in his new role, and he wasted no time announcing sweeping changes to Intel’s strategy. The company is going all-in on chip manufacturing...for other companies. Intel’s launching a foundry. 

Wait, what? These days, here’s how the semiconductor sausage typically gets made: A tech company designs a chip, then contracts out manufacturing to TSMC or Samsung factories in Asia. 

• Intel had traditionally stuck to manufacturing its own chips. Now, it’ll start doing so for others in the US and Europe, kicking off with a $20 billion investment in two Arizona factories. 
• In four years, the foundry market could = $100 billion, the company predicts. 

Big picture: Years after the “old Intel” fumbled a big step in chip manufacturing and lost steam to Samsung and TSMC—the latter of which controls over half the global market for custom chips—it might finally be able to steal back some market share. Intel’s foundry services are reportedly already backed by Amazon, Google, IBM, and Qualcomm. 

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VC

Transatlantic Tech Check

While you were talking ship memes and shrimp tails, Europe was making big moves in emerging tech funding. 

Europe formally launched its largest-ever VC fund: a $3.5 billion one run by the European Innovation Council. The ultimate goal: get in on still-emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and quantum computing.

• Also part of the mission? Help guide European tech startups through their two main “valleys of death,” as Bloomberg reports: 1) taking lab research commercial, and 2) growing higher-risk deep tech startups. 

Plus: EV maker Arrival SPAC’d yesterday and became the largest UK company listing in history, now worth over $13 billion. And Paris is getting its first blank-check company for tech investments, set to start trading in May. Earlier this month, the UK proposed loosening restrictions on SPACs to encourage growth in innovation. 

• All of this is a step forward for European SPACs, the total number of which we could count on two hands. 

Bottom line: Europe is upping its risk tolerance in hopes of a Silicon Valley-sized reward. 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: An NFT of digital artwork by humanoid robot Sophia sold via auction yesterday for $688,888. 

Quote: “We’ve found that Facebook’s completed purchase of Giphy raises competition concerns in relation to digital advertising and the supply of GIFs.”—The UK’s Competition & Markets Authority. 

Read: In honor of Medium’s OneZero seeming to shutter, we’re sending you to one of our all-time favorite pieces from the tech publication . 

Input: Asana’s Anatomy of Work 2021 report is dropping new stats on the latest work challenges—like how 70% of knowledge workers experienced burnout in the last year. Check out the full report.*

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says it’s time to make "adjustments"  to the federal EV tax credit, without sharing more details. 
• Volkswagen has set up an AI unit in Detroit. Left unsaid in VW’s press release announcement is that both it and Ford have put billions into Argo AI, the Pittsburgh self-driving company. 
• Fidelity is launching a bitcoin ETF. 
• The Broad Institute, a joint research center of MIT and Harvard, is launching a $300 million initiative to apply advanced computer science to the most difficult problems in medicine. 
• Apple forbids partners from using facial recognition on its employees, per The Information—but the protections don’t extend to factory workers. 
• Amazon came under fire for the poor working conditions some of its drivers and fulfillment employees are facing. The company’s official PR response on Twitter was poorly received and quickly debunked.

GOING PHISHING

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

1. The burrito chain mentioned in our top story also announced a new investment in a drone delivery startup this week. 
2. The Justice Department charged an Instagram influencer with defrauding his followers $2.5 million worth of bitcoin.  
3. Elon Musk says Starships will be landing on Mars “well before 2030.”
4. Beeple, who sold “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” for $69 million, thinks NFTs are a bubble.

FROM THE ARXIVES

Researchers at the University of Georgia’s Institute for AI developed an AI-enabled backpack to help visually impaired people navigate their surroundings, in lieu of guide dogs, canes, and other tools. 

The voice-activated backpack comes complete with spatial AI cameras, and it’s powered in part by an Intel AI toolkit. Camera data is processed in real time and relayed to the user via Bluetooth headphones. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Peloton’s new bets 
• Battle of the bans
• Facebook’s “intelligent click”

GOING PHISHING ANSWER

Chipotle didn't announce a new investment in a drone delivery startup this week. 

✢ A Note From Workiva

Slack is a registered trademark and service mark of Slack Technologies, Inc. Google is a registered trademark of Google LLC. TomTom is a registered trademark of TomTom International BV.